


Dead These Seven Years

by SolarPoweredFlashlight



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:31:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolarPoweredFlashlight/pseuds/SolarPoweredFlashlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riven is the only one left alive after the Zaunish acid attack; she has survived, but with deep wounds to both body and soul. Her time in Ionia never completely heals her, but it certainly changes her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead These Seven Years

The world touches her reawakening mind with a whispering caress of agony, agony, agony.

She moves. This is a mistake.

The agony screams itself to life, a bellow, a shriek, a hungry flame from shoulder to knee.

Riven gasps, trembling, as the beat of the rain falls harder on the shredded remains of her body. She chokes and splutters on the mud that has swollen up around her mouth and nostrils, prompting her back to consciousness.

Tears fill her eyes and she blinks them away. Rain, only rain.

Pain.

Only pain.

“Captain,” she croaks, shuddering, curling in on herself. Her eyes work, she has to remind herself, she can use her eyes even if everything else in her is terribly wrong.

She opens them, employing a decade of army discipline to gather the willpower. It’s barely enough.

Her eyes find the captain. Just a few paces away, where she last saw him before everything became screaming blackness. His bones, grey and pink and brown like every other set she can see scattered across the valley, do not help in identifying him. The great spiked helmet he favoured makes him easy to pick out, even though it seems to have sagged in on his face like a waterlogged piece of parchment.

She sits up, slowly. The rain beats still on her bare back.

Where is her armor? Wh –

The front half of the mighty Noxian war plate comes off her as she straightens, sucked into the mud. The back is gone. At the edges of the chest piece, droplets of dirty rain follow the tracks gored into the thick charcoal steel by droplets of Zaunish chemicals of war.

Horror grips her.

The back plate is gone. Melted away like snow in Shurima, dissolved more easily than butter cupped in a palm.

Her helmet is made of the same material.

Riven shakes, shakes, shakes unstoppably. She shakes with pain, she shakes with shock, she shakes with fear.

How much of her skull is liquid butter, ready to spill down her back and be washed away by the rain? Is she in the throes of death already? Is she really here, really sitting up in the squelching remains of Ionian soil, or is she seeing the carnage of the battlefield from the same perspective that her fallen captain is?

After all, they’re all dead. There’s no reason she should be the exception.

Riven gingerly touches her head. The movement of her arm awakes a fresh wave of pain screaming through her back and shoulder and the backs of her legs, and her vision goes white. When she regains thought and control over her body, she’s face-first on the ground again, and she can smell vomit among the toxic fumes and the valley floor.

But her head felt whole. It throbs, but it doesn’t burn – not the way her back does.

Over several minutes, she manages to fumble the chin strap open and pry her helmet from her head. It rolls limply into a puddle, escaping her frantic fingers. There isn’t a mark on it. But how?

…her sword. Where is her sword?

There, it’s there, by her side. Loyal, true, faithful sword. Noxian sword.

She remembers now. She remembers seeing the edge of the deadly acid rushing towards her, taking victims without regard for allegiance or strategy or strength. She remembers throwing herself to the ground and pulling her sword up out of its sheath and over her head, tucking herself into a ball and trying to hide as much of her body under its surface as possible.

It must have acted as a barrier. Based on the absence of much of her exposed body armor, she didn’t escape the melters entirely. But she survived them.

She’s alive.

And fuck but she wishes she weren’t.

 

-

 

The sound of water calls to her. She’s so thirsty. So in need of some way to clean the chemical-soaked wounds festering on her back.

She stumbles across the soft mossy floor of the forest, slipping on rocks and dead leaves in her eagerness. She can hear it. She can  _hear_  it.

Riven staggers towards the stream, dragging the weakened, wounded sword with her weakened, wounded body. She falls to her knees beside the cheerfully burbling Ionian water.

Only her sense of smell stops her from drinking deeply. She pulls back, looks closer, follows its path downstream. It gurgles and chokes around a cluster of rocks, throwing up a noxious foam. The water is thoroughly contaminated. She’ll probably die if she puts a drop of it in her mouth. Riven presses her face to her knees and tries not to sob. Zaun. Fuck Zaun.

But her back, her back is another story. The crusty remnants of whatever the melter spewed over it is still coating her flesh, pure and poisonous and ever, ever burning.

She unwinds makeshift bandages, peels them painfully from the giant scab. They’re brown where the fabric was once white – with what, she can’t say. But she can guess.

The battered soldier rinses them as best she can in the stream and tries not to think about the burning-plastic smell of the water. She knows that cleaning herself off is going to be extremely difficult and extremely unpleasant, but she doesn’t really have any other option.

Riven takes a breath, grits her jaw, and dabs the first dab over her shoulder.

 

-

 

Ionia has a lot of edible wildlife.

It also seems much bigger without a map, a scouting team, or a column to follow.

Riven is quite sure she’s walking in circles.

She comes across a trail through the forest and nearly turns around to avoid it, avoid being where people are, avoid being seen. Strategy never went into how Ionians treat their prisoners of war, if they even take them. Being picked up by Noxian forces after what she suspects has been several weeks now would almost be worse. They would want to know why she didn’t report back.

She stops to inspect the pathway. Dirt, a line carved through the trees by cart wheels and animal hooves. Riven remembers hearing a joke about Ionian livestock that made the rounds of camp a few months ago – their cattle are soft-spoken and meek like their men, their horses are spirited and stupid like their women, and their sheep are completely pointless to bother keeping, like their children.

It doesn’t seem very funny, in retrospect.

She can see the recent marks where dozens of horseshoes have crushed the grass at the edge of the pathway. Both nations use cavalry divisions in their armies, and she doesn’t have the tracking skill to tell the difference between the breeds by their footprints. Regardless, it means the war wages still.

The decision is made quickly. She crosses the path and continues on her way, leaving it behind her.

 

-

 

The first time she encounters one of the little forest shrines, her heart leaps to action and dread floods her limbs. Have her senses grown so weak that she’s stumbled right back into civilization without even knowing it?

She turns and flees at the sight of the wooden structure, praying the inhabitants fail to spot her.

The second time, she notices the moss that touches the ancient timbers. She inhales and she smells fox musk, rotting leaves, morning dew and fresh, clean air. There is no campfire smoke, no ink or metal or soap.

Riven draws near. The tiny building is shelter only to a rugged stone statue. It smiles up at her with a face that seems half infant, half elder – part man, part fox, part tree. Nobody lives here but this old Ionian object of worship. Curiously, she touches the spot on its crudely carved foot that has been worn smooth by thousands of passing hands.

What foolish ritual accompanies the touching of a statue’s foot, she wonders?

What prayers can a fat fox-tree-man answer? What gifts does it seek?

Riven stares into its eyes, wondering if she ought to feel something.

This old guardian of Ionia would likely want the blood to repay the debt Riven has accumulated on its soil. And would it be wrong to make that demand?

She touches the foot again, wondering.

And then she continues onwards.

When it next rains, she stumbles across another of these forest shrines. The cat-owl-woman watches over Riven with the same benevolent smile the fox-tree-man wore, unbothered by the intruder borrowing her roof to get a good night’s rest out of the rain. It’s the first time Riven isn’t plagued by nightmares since the melters.

In the morning, she touches the statue’s foot on her way back out into the soggy undergrowth.

 

-

 

She finds her way out of the valley at some point, although she’s not sure exactly when, among all these trees, that happened.

Then the forest ends, and she emerges out into a shifting sea of grass that gives way to something flat and brown and black off in the distance. She’s not far from another road – a proper one, wide enough for two carts to pass each other – and the whole thing is so churned to dust that she can see from here the Noxian column must have passed through at some point.

She’s not sure how long it’s been since her unit was lost. She’s seen the moon go through at least three cycles. It seems absurd to have spent all that time in the forest, but she’s not used to traveling alone, to moving of her own initiative instead of in a tightly packed marching formation with a predetermined course. With no sense of direction and no purpose other than survival and avoiding detection, she’s sure much of her travel these months has circled and meandered and doubled back in places.

For all the game she’s managed to capture, for all the streams she’s bathed in, her wounds still trouble her fiercely and she grows thinner and clumsier by the day.

Riven is always hungry. She forgets what the sensation of fullness is.

The army rations she once joined in ritual grumbling over seem like indulgent feasts in retrospect.

So she leaves the forest behind and wanders the plains, drawn towards the distant blackened spot. It doesn’t take long before she understands what the charred, trampled fields were.

Wheat.

Once upon a time, before her troops came, these vast swathes of grit and ashes must have been a golden ocean destined to become essential supplies of grain.

She walks through the dead and blackened fields, staining her ankles with the soot.

Riven walks from sunrise until sunset, her legs aching, and finds no end to the destruction.

Eventually, she picks out an overhang in the ditch along the road and presses her body into the makeshift refuge.

She wakes frequently throughout the night. The air is getting colder and curious insects come investigating her cracked, oozing back, but it is the nightmares that shake her out of sleep again and again.

 

-

 

This is how they find her, a week later. It is a different day, a different ditch, a different nightmare. But this is how they find the great legendary Noxian – a victim of war, screaming for mercy and forgiveness in foreign, garbled words, half starved and riddled with the poisons of her own allies.

The sight of their feet in the darkness terrify her. She is half asleep still, and the flicker of their torches curdles her belly with terror. Death by burning is up there in terms of bad ways to go, and she can envision that being the appropriate punishment for all the Ionians she’s killed with her blade and all the Noxians she’s killed with her cowardly desertion.

They drag her from her shallow grave and she can’t understand a word they’re saying, between how long its been since she heard another human voice and the strange accents twisting their syllables beyond recognition.

Their hands are kind and gentle, and Riven no longer has the strength to resist.

She learns later that they were farmers.

She learns later that they’ve gotten so good at treating chemical burns out of necessity, not out of any inherent healing ability.

She learns later that she slept for two weeks.

She learns later that she mumbled dark, fearful words in her sleep almost every night.

She learns later that the wounds of her back, if they’d been treated sooner, might not have scarred so horrendously.

But when she wakes, they tell her none of this.

When she wakes, all they have to say is “Eat this.”

Riven can’t hold the spoon; a scraggly Ionian child no older than eight kneels beside her face and feeds her porridge. She has never been more ashamed.

 

-

 

She leaves them with her helmet and the unmelted half of her right pauldron. They can use the metal for something, they say. She keeps a single pauldron and her sword, and discards the rest of what made her visibly Noxian.

She can’t discard her accent so easily.

When she meets people on the road, they don’t know her by sight, but they know her for an outsider if she makes the mistake of speaking. She takes to speaking less, to speaking more quietly, deliberately.

Riven wanders. She settles in towns for two or three weeks at a time, rebuilding fences and houses and replanting crops in exchange for food and a place to sleep. She says little. When accused of being a Noxian, she shows them her broken sword. They often believe her when she says she no longer serves their false ideals.

If they don’t, no matter. She moves on.

 

-

 

Riven travels the island for the better part of a year, following in the footsteps of her former comrades and sifting through the aftermath, looking for something, anything, left over for her to repair.

She cannot bring back the dead, and she is a pitiful healer, but she is lost for any other ideas.

No. No, that’s not true.

She has another idea.

She could give her strength to the Ionian army. She could give her knowledge to their leadership. Surely that would help more than piling toppled stone back into feeble fences and sitting awake at night by a burning torch to dissuade opportunistic bandits who will just move on to a camp less well-defended.

But she can’t.

She may not fight for the Noxian army anymore, but that doesn’t mean she can fight against it. That doesn’t mean she’s ready to pick up a blade and put it through the gut of someone she might have once led into battle.

So she clears away burned stalks of wheat, sets snares for rabbits and fat prairie rodents she has no name for, repairs roofs and digs defensive trenches.

Guilt weighs heavy on her shoulders even as she regains her strength and learns the Ionian words for the statues in the forests and the fat rodents in the fields.

 

-

 

Riven meets her in a forest shrine. She knows her way around the forests now. These days she follows the pathways without fear, with Noxus repelled from the north.

She stops in to say hello to the fat smiling lizard-moth-woman who watches over this particular grove of ancient trees and is startled to find someone already kneeling at her smooth stone feet.

Riven starts to back away, hoping she hasn’t been noticed, but the Ionian turns her head and smiles at her.

“You’re the wandering Noxian,” she says.

“Didn’t know I had a reputation,” Riven says, although she’s fully aware that she’s talked about in both kind and unkind tones among the villages she cycles through.

“It’s nice that you stop to visit with the old forest folk,” the woman says, and her gentle expression reaches her eyes. Riven wonders if it’s just their surroundings that make her think back to the smile on the first of the stone statues whose foot she touched in passing.

She looks up at lizard-moth-woman, but says nothing.

“Would you like to know their names?” the Ionian asks, soft as autumn sunlight.

Riven lets the tension start to leave her limbs.

“Sure,” she says.

“This one is A’taa’nu,” she whispers. Riven looks back at her and they make eye contact. “I’m on a spiritual journey to visit all of the old forest folk on my way to the capital. If you’d like to keep me company, I could introduce you to the others.”

Well. It’s not like she had anywhere else she needed to be.

“Sure,” she says. She can slip away in the night when she grows tired of this Ionian.

“She seems fond of you,” the woman says. “I’m looking forward to sharing the road with you. My name is Karma.”

Riven nods.

She doesn’t give her name out easily. Karma doesn’t press for it.

It takes a month of travel, but eventually Riven learns the names of all the old forest folk, and eventually Karma learns Riven’s.

 

-

 

“You’ve been dead for seven years,” Katarina hisses at her, betrayal in her eyes.

Riven wants to correct her, to tell her she’s spent seven years learning how to live again, but she doesn’t.

She wouldn’t understand.


End file.
